Car Listing Photos: Sizes, Counts and Privacy on Autotrader, Cars.com and Facebook

Published 19 October 2026 · by Tekiba

Autotrader

Autotrader's live site turned away our requests on the publication date above, so we read its seller guides as saved by the Internet Archive earlier this year. Its guide to writing a used-car ad says:

You can add a single photo or up to 30.

The maximum photo size you can upload to Autotrader is 10MB.

Another of its guides gives the same 10 MB, and an older one says 20 MB, so take the lower figure. We found no pixel size, file format or rule on text or watermarks on Autotrader's US pages. Autotrader UK, a separate company, publishes more. Its help centre asks for landscape photos, JPEG or PNG, and:

Check your aspect ratio is 1024x768 or a 4x3 format

It suggests at least 20 photos and allows up to 100 images, and its page on personal information is the one place we found that talks about the plate:

Whether you want to block the license plate in your photos, it's important to note that buyers often use the vehicle registration number to get an insurance quote

Cars.com

Cars.com's site also turned us away, and its Internet Archive copies do not agree with each other. The private-seller FAQ, saved this year, answers whether photos are required with a plain "Yes". A Cars.com article on picture-perfect ads, published in 2022, says:

sellers can upload a minimum of one photo — or up to 30 — using landscape (i.e., horizontal) orientation.

Its Sell Your Car terms, last updated in 2019, say a listing can have "from 0-25 photos" and that photos "will only show the vehicle listed for sale and may not include under any circumstances people, animals, or other objects not part of the vehicle." Check the count on the upload screen; the rule about people is the one to keep either way.

Facebook Marketplace

Facebook's Help Center tells you to click Add photos and stops there: we found no size, count, shape or watermark rule for a private vehicle listing, and the older Meta help pages on selling vehicles that search engines still list no longer load. Our article on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist photo sizes and privacy covers what Meta does publish about photos in general.

What a car photo gives away

The first three are invisible and easy to clear. The last two are in the pixels, and a resize or a re-save keeps them. Whether to hide the plate is your call: Autotrader UK points out that buyers use it for insurance quotes. If you do, cover it before you take the photo, or use a photo editor that can blur or paint over a region; SignetDrop places a watermark in a corner of the frame and cannot follow the plate.

Clearing and sizing a batch in the browser

1. Shoot in landscape, with nothing personal in view. Move the car away from the house number if you can, and put papers with your name on them out of shot.

2. Open SignetDrop and add the photos. Untick the text mark: none of these sites asks for one, and Cars.com's terms allow only the vehicle in the photo. At Longest edge 2048 a 4032×3024 photo becomes 2048×1536, the free version's ceiling, which is 4:3 and well under the per-file limits above. Name them with a prefix such as civic-2018-.

3. Download the ZIP. Each copy is drawn on a canvas and saved again from those pixels, which carries none of the original's EXIF across: no GPS position, no time, no phone model. Keeping EXIF is a paid option, works JPEG to JPEG only and is off unless you switch it on. Upload the copies, not the originals.

What this does not do

It does not see what is in the picture: a plate, a VIN on the windscreen, a document on the seat or a reflection stays exactly as you shot it. It does not upload to any of these sites, and what a site does with a photo after you upload it is not ours to control. Output above 2048px and larger batches are in the paid version, $29 once, with the full split on the pricing panel, and SignetDrop never writes its own name onto your photos.

Questions